Welsh National Opera (WNO) is an opera company founded in Cardiff, Wales in 1943. The WNO tours Wales, the United Kingdom and the rest of the world extensively. Annually, it gives more than 120 performances of eight main stage operas to a combined audience of around 150,000 people. It gives regular performances in Cardiff, Llandudno, and Swansea in Wales, and Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Milton Keynes, Oxford, Plymouth, and Southampton in England. Because the number of performances in England exceeds the number in Wales, Arts Council England is the company's largest source of grant funding, ahead of the Arts Council of Wales. The company has been led by Chief Executive and Artistic Director David Pountney since 2011.
Read more about Welsh National Opera: The Formation of The Company, The Development of The Company and Orchestra, Music Directors
Famous quotes containing the words welsh, national and/or opera:
“Thy tongue
Makes Welsh as sweet as ditties highly penned,
Sung by a fair queen in a summer’s bower,
With ravishing division, to her lute.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We are constantly thinking of the great war ... which saved the Union ... but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before—a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Opera once was an important social instrument—especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.”
—Luciano Berio (b. 1925)